Load balancing distributes workloads across multiple physical or virtual machines. In a virtualized datacenter environment, a load balancer may be implemented by a virtual machine running on one of multiple host computers. For example, one virtual machine may provide load balancing for a tenant within the datacenter. To distribute workloads, a virtual Internet Protocol (IP) address is assigned to the virtual load balancer. As each packet addressed to the virtual IP address is received, the virtual load balancer selects one of multiple physical or virtual machines to perform a service on the packet. If, for example, the packet is a request for a web server, the virtual load balancer uses a load balancing algorithm to select one of the multiple physical or virtual machines implementing the web server. The load balancer forwards the traffic to the selected physical or virtual machine, e.g., by changing the destination address of packets in a flow to the unique address of the selected physical or virtual machine. Each packet, therefore, traverses a path from a switch or router, through a virtualization software layer within a host computer, to the virtual load balancer, and, upon selection of a web server, back to the virtualization software layer and on to the web server, which may be within the same host computer or external to the host computer. Additionally, some load balancing solutions route responses from the web server back through the virtual load balancer before the response is delivered to the device that transmitted the original request for the web server. All requests, and possibly some responses, therefore pass through the virtual load balancer. The virtual load balancer, therefore, is a choke point for network throughput. Each traversal between the virtualization software layer and the virtual machine implementing the load balancer consumes memory and processing resources within the host computer.